One reason he hesitated was that he assumed my grandmother would be against moving so far away. But she was, much to his surprise, more than willing to try for a new life in New York. She was equally unhappy with the pressures of his job and even more with the atmosphere surrounding recent divisions in the ruling league. Thant had managed to stay friends with both sides, but how much longer would this last? “Don’t take a few days; U Nu tends to be mercurial,” she said. “Accept while the offer is there.” The next morning Thant told Nu that he would go to the United Nations. Four years later he was elected the organization’s third secretary-general, succeeding Dag Hammarskjöld. He served until 1971.
DEMOCRACY’S DYING DAYS
The 1950s are often looked back on as a golden age for the Burmese middle classes. To many these were the years of freedom and progress and at least a sense of hope for the future. They now occupied all the top civil service posts once the preserve of Europeans, lived in the pukka houses of Rangoon’s Golden Valley and Windermere Park, and entered occasionally lucrative business ventures, sometimes on the coattails of their Indian and Chinese compatriots. These were also the days of an animated and unrestrained media, with hundreds of newspapers and magazines, like the lively Nation newspaper set up by Edward Law-Yone, the iconoclastic part-English grandson of a Yunnanese muleteer who had served with the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) during the war.
There was also progress in education. As King Mindon had done exactly a hundred years before, U Nu’s government sent hundreds of young men and women to universities abroad as state scholars. The majority went to the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries, but a good number went to the United States. My father, Tyn Myint-U (U Thant’s future son-in-law), was one of these new America-bound students. Soon after the British takeover of Mandalay in 1885, his great-grandfather, who had been Thibaw’s privy treasurer, had retired to their ancestral villages at Dabessway, next to Ava, together with his extended family, returning to the royal city only years later. As was the case for many of the old Court of Ava, the following years were a period of deep bitterness and ill feeling toward the Raj, combined with nostalgia and vain attempts to keep up the old ways.
Some mementos of the old court—the golden salway worn by the nobility, a fading photograph of my great-great-grandfather in court dress, now retouched with color—were kept, but very soon there would be little to distinguish my father’s family from anybody else’s. It was a big family. His father was the youngest of eleven children, including nine boys. In the 1920s one of his great-uncles, Mandalay Ba U, had set up a passionately nationalist as well as monarchist newspaper, the Bahosi, formed an ultraconservative party, and then won a seat in Parliament. For a short while he had been a minister in Dr. Ba Maw’s 1937 government. My father grew up around that time and was old enough to remember the destruction of Mandalay and his family’s panicked flight by bullock cart in early 1942 to a little village up north, where they waited out the Japanese occupation.
In the U Nu days, after a few years at Rangoon University, my father was among many of his generation eager to improve themselves in the bigger world, applying for and winning a prized state scholarship. He was first assigned to the Queen’s University at Belfast, but believing he would be doomed to endless meals of fish and chips and hoping to be somewhere closer to Hollywood, he arranged to swap with another successful candidate and was eventually sent to study engineering at the University of Michigan in blustery Ann Arbor. He was one of many that year (1953), and his particular group left altogether for America, first by ship through the Suez Canal, then by plane from London (where he thought he was sitting next to Elizabeth Taylor), and finally by train from New York, over the Appalachians and through the Ohio Valley. It was all very far from Mandalay, but the scholarships of those years did much to produce a solid class of young professionals and civil servants. But sadly, with the changes in store, few would ever have the chance to help in their country’s development.
*
When my grandfather left Burma in the summer of 1957, together with his wife and two children (my mother, Aye Aye Thant, and her younger brother, both teenagers), he was excited by the prospects of the new job and being part of the still-young UN. But he (and my grandmother) also wanted to leave the increasingly ugly political atmosphere in Rangoon. The rot began at the top. After a decade in power, and despite electoral success, the league had begun to fall apart by the mid-1950s. It had always been a hodgepodge of competing interests, ambitions, and loyalties, held together by the partnerships at the very peak, between U Nu and his chief lieutenants. Now these lieutenants, in particular Ministers U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, were becoming restive. There was no clear ideological divide or really even differences over policy. It was more the story of friends and colleagues who after twenty years living and working at close quarters, through war and peace, were getting tired of one another—and whose wives were getting tired of one another, with U Nu, Ba Swe, and Kyaw Nyein’s wives barely, if at all, on speaking terms. With the wives having fallen out, people said it was only a matter of time before the league would come apart as well.14
The irony was that the league had succeeded well at the ballot box and still enjoyed a comfortable majority in Parliament. The formal split came on June 1958, a windy and rainy day, and everyone present knew that an era, which had begun in the Student Union in the mid-1930s, was now coming to a close. U Nu’s own chief ministers had submitted a no-confidence motion against the government. There were rumors of coups and countercoups, and armored cars patrolled outside while U Nu and his rivals, all in their yellow or pink headdresses, gave their contending speeches in the cream-colored Chamber of Deputies, fans whirring overhead and a portrait of Aung San hanging directly behind them. U Nu survived the vote, but only just. The league was now only half its former self, and the government, to stay in power, depended on the support of hard-core leftists in Parliament. This frightened the military.
Everything now became very messy. U Nu’s marriage of convenience with the “aboveground” Communists (as distinct from the Communist insurgents) unsettled the army, whose officers veered toward support for the prime minister’s opponents. Even worse, the split at the very top of the league had begun to mirror the split in the countryside, politicians in each town and village breaking up into rival factions. Army commanders in the field complained about all this and the instability it was causing and accused U Nu’s party loyalists of direct harassment. These field commanders, led by the northern commander Colonel Aung Shwe (later chairman of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy), then began to conspire among themselves. More rumors circulated. Some said that units of the Union Military Police, loyal to U Nu’s home minister, would soon take over Rangoon. Others said that the field commanders would move in with their troops and seize the capital.
On 22 September soldiers under the command of Colonel Kyi Maung (another future chairman of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party), together gether with Special Forces directly under the War Office, surrounded key government offices as well as the Windermere compound that was home to most cabinet ministers and senior civil servants. U Nu was told in no uncertain terms that the field commanders were planning a coup, but that the War Office and the men around General Ne Win would protect him. It was, ostensibly, a “preemptive” coup by the War Office to protect the government from the disgruntled commanders in the field.
Four days later in September, U Nu spoke over Radio Rangoon and announced that he had invited General Ne Win “to assume the reins of government—in a ‘Caretaker Government’—due to the prevailing situation regarding security and law and order,” until fresh elections could be held. The army had taken over.
*
The army’s caretaker government that followed was, by all accounts, the most effective and efficient in modern Burmese history. It was also high-handed and at times brutal. Corruption was exposed and rooted out, including at the highest levels of administr
ation. The press and law courts were generally kept free and independent. Prices were kept stable, and technocrats were slotted into key ministerial positions.
Rangoon got a face-lift. Houses were ordered to be painted, the rubbish in the streets removed, and about 165,000 squatters, mainly people displaced from the civil war, were forced to move into new satellite towns outside the city. Prior to 1958 Rangoon had been filthy, with squalid squatters’ camps and packs of pariah dogs. A can-do colonel took over the administration of the capital, and mobilizing a hundred thousand people every Sunday for twenty-five weeks, he collected over ten thousand tons of rubbish for disposal. For the middle classes this was a good thing, perhaps much less so for poor people, who now had to trek long distances to their work. In the countryside the reorganization of district law and order personnel under new “security councils” brought about a steep drop in violent crime. Gangsters and racketeers were arrested and locked up.
At the same time, the army had lost no time prosecuting the war. List after list was published of rebels who had been killed, wounded, or captured. In the early 1950s the back of the Communist threat had been broken; now the last Communist bases were overrun. Against other insurgencies as well, Rangoon went from strength to strength, and for the first time it looked as if Burma’s civil war was actually nearing an end. A glossy publication Is Trust Vindicated? showcased the army’s accomplishments.
The caretaker government lasted until December 1960, when it held promised elections. But all its efficiency failed to convince voters to elect the anti–U Nu faction it supported. Instead the charismatic, if less efficient, U Nu was returned by a landslide. General Ne Win himself was nonchalant and handed power back as promised. He gave the impression of never having enjoyed the extra responsibility and certainly of not wanting it back in the future if at all avoidable. He grumbled about his sinuses, took to the Rangoon party scene, and complained that as acting prime minister he had not had enough time for his golf.15 He shunned publicity, and at the one press conference he held, he told newsmen to write whatever they wanted and then walked out. It was a studied disinterest. Even though the army stood down, it was still very much in the picture. In the countryside solidarity councils had been set up with the motto Lightning from the Sky, to circumvent party politics and provide a power base right down to the village level. And the military’s own business empire grew by leaps and bounds, moving into everything from bookshops to fisheries to soft drinks. The army men believed they had acquitted themselves admirably and could run the country better than anyone else. They wanted another chance, this time without any electoral deadline looming overhead.
TOWARD THE COUP OF 1962
Soon after the invasion of Thibaw’s kingdom, Sir George Scott (the man who introduced football to Burma) and other British representatives had met with all the various Shan chiefs in the eastern hills, a beautiful plateau of rolling highlands, lakes, and near-perfect weather, convincing or compelling them one by one to accept a fairly light version of colonial rule. There would be a British superintendent based at the hill station of Taunggyi and men of the Frontier Service would advise the chiefs as necessary, but in general they would be left to themselves and their hereditary rights would be honored. In 1922 a Council of Chiefs was set up with a British official as president, but no other reforms were introduced, and the hills remained happily uninvolved in the politics and problems of the plains. For more than a generation after the fall of the Court of Ava, the little Shan courts maintained many of the same traditions, giving a glimpse of what Upper Burma itself might have been like if the British had chosen to establish a protectorate rather than abolish the monarchy altogether.
By the 1950s the sawbwas were all men who had grown up under British rule. Nearly all had studied at a school in Taunggyi, set on a hilltop amid pleasant grassy fields and run in the manner of an English boarding school, complete with an imported headmaster and a rigorous schedule of games. Some had also gone on to school and university in England and America. At Hsipaw, for example, an ancient mountain valley town along the winding Namtu River, the local chief, Sao Kya Hseng, had an engineering degree from Colorado in the United States. His father, Sao On Kya, had studied at Rugby and Brasenose College, Oxford. Many were seen by the British as gentlemen who combined the best of Eastern and Western manners, and for a few decades the Shan States seemed to enjoy an almost idyllic peace and prosperity.16
Another leading chief was the sawbwa of the tea-producing statelet of Mongmit, Sao Hkun Hkio. He had met his wife, Mabel, when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early fifties, when both happened to be walking their dogs on Parker’s Piece. Her parents were modest townspeople, and when Sao Hkun Hkio proposed, they had no objection, though they couldn’t have had an inkling of the life she would later lead. The couple were soon married, but when the young prince finally plucked up the courage to tell his father, the ruling sawbwa at the time, he was angrily told to return home at once or risk losing everything. Mabel was not acceptable. What could he do? He couldn’t go home and leave his new bride, but he also had no money to stay in England. He thought about finding a job in Cambridge or London but decided in the end to face his father and hope for the best.
The father would not give way, even when told that Mabel had just had their first child, a son. Luckily for the young couple, the father soon died, and the son ascended the throne as the new sawbwa with Mabel as the mahadevi, or “great goddess,” of Mongmit. There they lived for many years, with their children and dogs, four great Danes and a bloodhound, as the rulers of dozens of misty tea-growing villages all around. Mongmit itself was a small place, more like a sprawling village, pressed up along the China border and just past the ruby mines of Mogok. Sao Hkun Hkio would go on to a distinguished career in independent Burma, as foreign minister under U Nu and later as a deputy prime minister and head of the Shan States.
After the army took over in 1962, Hkun Hkio was imprisoned, like all the Shan chiefs (Sao Kya Hseng, the Colorado graduate, would never be seen again). When freed after a few years, he left the country, never to return. He and Mabel retraced their steps back to equally misty Cambridge, to a house not far from Parker’s Piece. He had just died when I went up to Cambridge to begin work on a Ph.D. at Trinity College. This was in 1991, and unlike at the turn of the century, when there were dozens of Burmese students and a Cambridge Burmese Students Association, when I arrived I was the only Burmese there (as far as I knew), except for Pascal Khoo Thwe (later the author of From the Land of Green Ghosts17), who introduced me to the old sawbwa’s family. When I called on Mabel, she was still living in the unassuming semidetached house they shared, with a little sign on the door that said MONGMIT.
But that was years ahead. Back in the 1950s it was these chiefs of Mongmit and Hsipaw, both close to U Nu and the new Rangoon establishment, who dominated politics in the Shan States. The biggest problem was the invasion of the Chinese Nationalists and the resulting influx of often heavy-handed Burma Army troops. In many places they were the first and only ethnic Burmese the people of this part of the country had ever seen. Grievances arose. Areas of the Shan States were placed under military administration, and by the mid-1950s there were some who were agitating for Shan self-rule. U Nu argued against this, but many younger Shans began looking at the Karen example and thinking about their own insurgency. An embryonic Shan Army was formed in 1958 along the Thai border.
For the Chinese Nationalists and their backers this was a good thing. The KMT was still operating through Thai and Taiwanese support, and it was hoped that a Shan insurgency would provide a more legitimate facade. The Thais also wanted a buffer against their age-old enemies the Burmese. Everyone also wanted a piece of the opium trade. Iran and China—both once the biggest growers of opium in the world—had stopped production, and in their place had emerged the border areas of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, the so-called Golden Triangle. Bangkok was now the international center for drug trafficking, and there was a lot of money a
t stake as well as an unseemly number of prominent people involved. Thai strongman and army commander Sarit Thanarat had taken power in a coup in 1957 and had promised President Eisenhower that he would turn his country “into the bulwark that the US needed to halt the communist advance in East Asia.” Anything Thailand did to help Burmese rebels or facilitate the drug trade would be fine with Washington.18
Way up north, the Kachins were also growing unhappy with their lot in independent Burma. A border agreement with China had left three Kachin villages on the Chinese side, and U Nu’s recent decision to make Buddhism the state religion had angered the mainly Christian Kachins. On 5 February 1961 a Kachin Independence Army, headed by war hero and U.S. Detachment 101 veteran Zau Seng, was founded in the hills not far from Hsenwi and Mongmit. As with the Shans, though the incipient rebel forces were tiny, there was now a clear indication that things might easily spiral in an even more violent direction.
Around the same time, twenty thousand troops of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army crossed over the border into the Shan state of Kengtung, near Thailand. Their aim was to crush the KMT, and the KMT was forced south, where it was attacked by the Burmese army’s Ninth Brigade. Several bases were captured, and large quantities of U.S.-made arms and ammunition were found.19 Over the next many months many of the defeated Chinese Nationalists were airlifted to Taiwan, but many thousands of others remained, some on the Burma side, others in northern Thailand, and a few hundred in Laos, where they were recruited into the Royal Laotian Army to fight the rebel Pathet Lao.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 37
